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Mushkin Debuts 500GB mSATA SSD

Mushkin has announced the impending release of a new micro-SATA Solid State Drive, offering a half terrabyte storage (480GBs, so there about) space along with all the speed benefits of a SATA III SSD.

Known simply as the Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD, it offers double the capacity of Mushkin's previous offering, leading it to proclaim it as the biggest mSATA SSD in the world. Thanks to its small form factor and high performance, it's clearly marketed at ultrabook inclusion for system builders. However, anyone with a notebook that is pushing the limits of its current SSD and doesn't want to lose performance by switching to a big 2.5" HDD, this could be the way to go. Similarly if you're still using a hard drive in your notebook and are worried about space, here's your solution.

Set for release in early 2013, the Mushkin 480GB mSATA SSD will be priced at $499, making just a little bit more expensive than $1 per GB. While this is still way behind hard drives in terms of cost per gigabyte, long gone are the days of spending many hundreds of dollars on sub 100GB SSDs.

“We’re excited to present our latest Atlas 480GB mSATA solid state drive, demonstrating once again Mushkin’s consistent ability to combine top performance, functionality, capacity, and low-power innovation,” said Brian Flood, director of product development at Mushkin. “Keeping z-height as low as possible and managing to fit eight NAND flash chips and a controller on a mSATA PCB was no easy feat, but now capacity-hungry Ultrabook and notebook users can go beyond the 256GB mSATA barrier.”

I suspect most of you guys game on a desktop, but some of you must use a notebook. Does this look like a viable buy to you?

How many motherboards and processors must we swap every time some industry nut bar decides to change the roman numerals on computing hardware? Must we wait for a Sata IV before few billionths of tens of millions nano calculations can reduce heat redundancy checks by a factor of 3% and spin cycles go up by 0.999910 decibels before data loss can corrupt memory allocation tables?